The emotion of hope is one of the most important and positive emotions available to human beings. When facing difficult times, such as an illness, a divorce or loss of a job, hope keeps us moving forward.

As you create a new vision and desired outcome for your life, hope absolutely can give you energy to generate it. That is the positive side of hope. But being overly invested in “hoping” can, ironically, also keep you in the Dreaded Drama Triangle (DDT)™. When this happens, we call it being “victimized by hope.”

If you obsessively look to the future and fantasize about a perfect relationship, or future job, or that picture-perfect house, you can unknowingly put off your happiness, hoping for a better future than the life you have today.

Without realizing it, the hopeful vision may become a silent cloud hanging over you. You may hear a subtle voice that says, “I want that amazing job so much, but it feels so immense and far-off. Instead, I guess I am stuck in this job I hate forever.” In this state, the hoped-for vision brands your current life a problem—the Persecutor—and you become a Victim to your own vision.

To relieve your suffering, you may double-down and tell yourself if you just stay hopeful the universe will provide and will Rescue you from your current situation. Having a drama relationship with hope means you can feel victimized by your hoped-for vision—-unknowingly holding it as a Persecutor to the present while still clinging to it as a Rescuer in the future. You literally can be in all three DDT roles with hope, at the same time!

How could this be? How could a positive emotion become a negative? It all happens through your thoughts.

Your experiences do not happen to you. Rather, they are created within you via your thoughts. It is impossible for you to experience anything without your thinking being involved. But your thinking can happen in the background and be so elusive you don’t realize you have created your own drama!

Because it goes unnoticed, the subtle nature of giving your power and happiness to future circumstances can easily cause a mistaken understanding of how you create your own life. When you don’t realize this fact, you can fall into a trap of believing that outside circumstances determine your success or happiness. Said another way, you are at the mercy of life’s event. This is the classic definition of a Victim—-being at the mercy of life’s events.

The shift from Victim to Creator—-the central shift and role in TED* (*The Empowerment Dynamic)®—- begins by taking responsibility for your thoughts and taking action today and not giving your personal power away to others, or the future.

Engage, instead, on what is in front of you now. Take responsibility. Move the energy you spend on hoping and wishing toward taking responsibility to create your life today. This starts with your thinking.

Consistently placing your thoughts upon a positive future, without taking action, can actually disempower you. This happens because being overly invested in the future, distracts and drains your energy from what is yours to do, today.

We want to again affirm the positive aspects of hope. Having a desired outcome you care about, evokes hope and possibility. It is when you become overly attached to the hope without taking action that the hope can work against you.

All qualities have a positive aspect, but when overused can become negative. If you are someone who “over uses” hope as a way to avert your focus on taking action today, then engage now. Don’t wait. Turn someday into now.

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The 3 Vital Questions online course provides an organizational context that makes the Power of TED* frameworks and processes actionable and easy to apply in everyday situations and creates cultures of empowerment that produce results.